Explorations in Technology, Productivity and Life

Tag Archives: OneNote

After months of working on options to pull myself away from my reliance of Google products I’ve thrown in the towel – my apologies to all those out there who were hoping I’d reach escape velocity.

Folks that have wandered around the site know that I’ve always been big on Google products and the fact that I couldn’t just drop them all and walk away shouldn’t be a cause for alarm, but there are a few things I’ve observed.

The world loves Chrome. There are some other great browsers out there (firefox comes to mind) but, they don’t really seem to get the love when it comes to add-ins. Yes, I have a few that are specific to Google services but there are others that I can’t seem to find an equivalent for, and since I don’t want to give my the functionality – Chrome it is.

Gmail just rocks. I realize that might not sound professional but it’s the best way to describe it. I rarely have an issue accessing it and the spam filtering is fantastic – hard to give those up. I’m also on an apps domain which I share with others so I can just summarily take it down without impact them so that’s also a blocker for me as well. (By the way, the new inbox app for Android is pretty solid as well.)

Google Voice. I’ve been using a number through their system since before it was their system (anyone remember GrandCentral?) and while it hasn’t gotten as much love as it could have over the years the voicemail system works well for what I need it to do.

Mobile. Other than Apple there aren’t a lot of choices beyond Android and while I carry an iPhone for work (and everyone else but me at home does as well) I didn’t want one for my personal phone. I opted for the 2nd generation Moto X and, to be honest, have been very happy with it to date.

I could go one by I really don’t want this to turn into a Google fanboy post (it might already be there anyway).

Am I all in with Google? No, there are a few areas where the giant G taken over.

Notetaking. As I mentioned previously I’ve moved to OneNote for my notetaking setup. These are the notes that I want to have for the long haul such as projects I’m working on.

Social media. Yes, I’m still on Google+ and post things there from time to time and belong to a number of communities but my focus of late has been twitter and I’ve recently setup a facebook page for those that would like to use that platform to follow me (please be sure to like it as I’m just getting it rolling).

Photos. While there is plenty of love for pictures inside of Google, I’m setup with flickr and don’t see that changing. It does make it easier to share over with family who primarily use facebook.

Does this mean that I’m going to look to the mighty G for a solution to everything and stop exploring other avenues? Absolutely not, if I’ve learned one thing on this journey is that there are never enough solutions to a problem and rarely are they all from the same source.

So the question has to be asked, are you all in with Google? Avoid them likely the plague? Or are you somewhere in the middle? Please share in the comments below.

Long time followers of this blog will know that I have been a huge fan of Evernote, so much so that at one point it was my goto tool for everything. I stored my task list in it, clipped articles to it to read later, I stored photos of receipts in it, I even forwarded voicemail and newsletters to it.

In that post he mentioned that they had improved the stability of the product and were going to be working to improve all of the clients. Unfortunately for me, I haven’t had that experience. In fact, tonight I was presented this:

That’s right, you’re seeing a notebook that says it has two notes in it but the display shows that they are none to show. I triple checked that I didn’t have a filter going and verified that the notes exist in both the web and Android clients.

Did I open a trouble ticket? Nope, and I’ll be upfront as to why. In every case I have opened a ticket the resolution has always been the same – remove the software and install it again. The last time I had an issue not only was this the instruction of tech support but they also directed me to install a beta version of the software with no clear, “this will resolve your issue,” explanation.

When you couple that with the issues I’ve recently had with being unable to remove tags from the Windows client (not see in the Android versions) and an issue where the sync setting on my phone kept turning off – I’ve had enough.

So today I decided to cancel my premium subscription (I was a subscriber for over two years) and move to OneNote.

I know that some will see this as a radical move but when you can’t trust a product for something that’s supposed to be a core function it’s time to change.

I’ve been using OneNote for about six months at work and have not had a single hiccup to date – hopefully it will hold up just as well with everything else I’ll be throwing at it.